We are the keepersof the churches’ money.As keepers we divvy and we paybut not to you directly, we won't give you moneybut we 'll give you new teetha new radiator, a brand new funeral.What more could you ask for?

It’s not that we want your painto be everlasting,but by the same tokenit suits a narrative for yeto come on national radio and complainand say we have no compassion.

We have oodles of it,but we ration our compassion.If we give you stuff without humiliating youit will be no fun at all.

So fill out that form and then fill anotherand another and anotherand one for your sisterand one for your brotherand while you’re at itfill one out for your mother.

Don't listen to the guy who said,criminal records are given outlike holy communion to people in institutions.We all know he stole an appleotherwise why would he have been there?

Some applicants will never be happyand its suits a narrative,of the big bad churchand the big bad stateand the big bad buildingwith the big bad gate.

Note: Survivors of institutional child abuse in Ireland have been told that the state organisation tasked with supporting their health, housing and other needs is to wind down from 1 August 2018.

This poem was first published in Reading the Future: New Writing from Ireland: Celebrating 250 Years of Hodges Figgis.

boss i have heardsome human beans thinkhungry and homeless peopleare like cockroaches iam flattered at last some humans beans feelsorry for us poor insectshooray there is hope for some human beans after all either that or thehuman beans who think hungry and homeless people are like cockroachesare worse than cockroaches we would never be so unkind archy

Fearful Symmetry

for Sheree Mack

by Andy Croft

‘Each has a gift that Nature gave,But some their neighbour’s fame must crave.’- Ivan Krylov

The lion shakes its regal mane, The monkey thumps his chest, The narwhal waves its tusk, the crab his claws; The peacock flaunts its gorgeous train, The bowerbird his nest, The civet sprays her musk, the tiger roars, As they will: Creation on the catwalk dressed to kill.

What artist’s palette ’ere revealed Such bright and vivid hues? What hand or eye could frame such drop-dead threads?What cobbler’s last has ever heeled So many fuck-me shoes? This cattle-market game of turning heads Means your date Is either your next meal or else your mate.

Alas, far from the critics’ praise There dwells Arachne’s kin Whose intricate designs go unrewarded; Condemned by vain and boastful ways To sit alone and spin And know their silken lines are not applauded, Spiders must Live out their days in realms of gloom and dust.

Frustrated by their dark estate, The eight-legged tribe agreed To give a special prize to Nature’s spinners;So others might appreciate The art that spiders need, They asked their friends the flies to crown the winners. As it does, The teeming insect world began to buzz.

While waiting for the six-legged crowdTo hit the spiders’ gala,Each thought her own design beyond compare, Original, authentic, proud –But flies know that the parlourWhere spiders like to dine, that winding stair,Leads us straightTo something that no art can imitate.

And so, while other creatures sing And preen and prance and puff, This cobweb crew’s always the world’s outsiders; When artless Nature does its thing, And struts its gorgeous stuff, The little beady gaze of every spider’s Still on the prize, In realms of dust and dark, still counting flies.

the fucking dame is fucking furious and not fucking having itfucking up is fucking downfucking in is fucking outfucking master is fucking slavefucking Palestine is fucking neverfucking Goliath is fucking Davidfucking catapult is fucking atom bombthe fucking wall was fucking builtto keep the fucking Arabs offthe fucking land fucking snatchedfucking fair and fucking square

and if you lot dare say I stalk about the fuckingHouse of Commons spittingwords like ‘fucking’ or mentionthe fucking bust of fucking LeninI fucking bought and fucking placedin Islington Town fucking Hall when I was first elected fucking queen you’ll be hearing from the fucking lawyer my fucking hubby gifted me our first night together sincerely fucking yours, Margaret Hodge

Alan Dent introduces and reviews the recent collection of poems about work by Martin Hayes.

From Chaucer to the present day, hardly any poetry in English is about work. Most of it has been written by men from the higher reaches of society. Chaucer’s father married Agnes Copton who inherited twenty-four shops, as well as other property. Chaucer himself worked for the Countess of Ulster, and one of his relatives was a moneyer.

Dunbar worked for King James, who paid him a pension estimated at about eighty pounds Scottish, a handsome amount. Edmund Spenser was educated at Merchant Taylor’s, London and Pembroke, Cambridge. He served Baron Grey, owned land in the Munster Plantation and by his thirties he also owned an estate at Kilcolman.

John Donne’s father died when he was four. A few months later, his mother married the wealthy Dr John Syminges. Donne was privately educated, studied at Hart Hall, Oxford, and later at Cambridge.

Keats’s father was a hostler, but he rose to manage the inn where he worked. At nineteen, Keats received two bequests: one from his grandfather worth £800 and £8,000 from his mother’s legacy. A total of some £550,000, at today’s values.

There are exceptions, but by definition they are rare. Most of our poetry has been written by people who have not needed to work, have inherited wealth or have been paid very well. The harsh fact of employment as the means of a roof and food, and poverty or destitution being only one or two wage packets away, has been very distant from most of our poets.

By contrast, Martin Hayes writes principally about employment. Even these days it is almost a taboo topic. The legacy of the Romantics permeates contemporary poetry. The requirement to display a superior, exquisite sensibility bubbles away in the background of most poets’ work. This generates what Miroslav Holub identified as a widespread failing – too much subjectivity, too much toothache.

Employment is a demeaning subject because employment is demeaning. As Hayes puts it:

we help these corporations exist

as our 83 year old mothers have to fill out 28 page forms

to see if they qualify for meals on wheels…

If part of your motivation in writing, conscious or otherwise, is to prove your superiority of response, why write from the point of view of an employee? An employee is by definition inferior. An employee is subject to an employer’s contract. An employee must comply. An employee is a supplicant. An employee must please the employer, or face being demoted, thwarted or sacked. An employee must define himself or herself by promotion, remuneration, position in the hierarchy. An employee’s identity is in the hands of an employer.

Like his American friend Fred Voss, Martin Hayes works for a living. He writes from the employee’s perspective:

a man I work with

cries every time it gets too busy...

He works in the London courier industry, which is one of those modern, cut-throat operations ripe for zero-hours contracts and the intrusions of the so-called “gig economy”. The phrase is a terrible misnomer – it ought to be called the “you-get-shafted economy”.

Hayes is a husband, a father, a son, a nephew, a cousin, a friend, but none of these categories can be permitted to define our identities. Our economic system requires people to define themselves as ‘hands’, as employees. A good husband, wife, father, brother, son, daughter or friend is a failure if they don’t have a job, status and pay. It is against this tyranny – and it is nothing less – that Hayes’s poetry protests.

His style is demotic. Arguably the greatest exponent of demotic style employed for high-minded ends in English is Joe Orton, who once remarked that he came from the gutter and wasn’t going to forget it. Literature isn’t supposed to come from the gutter. The first working-class writer in English was Lawrence, and it is little wonder that he was snobbishly dismissed as a heretic.

Hayes, like Lawrence and Orton, is speaking for those whose lives are supposed to be not worth speaking about. Lawrence once observed that as much happens to working people as anyone else. He knew it from experience, but our culture denies it. Life happens to the rich and powerful, politicians, celebrities, magnates, pop stars with private jets, footballers with glamorous wives, and dubious businessmen with private islands. The rest become an indistinguishable mass whose experience is worthless. Only by identifying with money and power do their lives gain any significance.

Hayes is intent on revealing the significance of the lives of employees, but it isn’t a pretty picture:

the controllers come in on Monday mornings

full of stories about imaginary women…

Like the employees, his poems tell stories too. Usually they are stories of the stupidity of management, impossible working conditions, unattainable deadlines or targets, exhaustion, boredom, frustration, waiting for the salary that will barely get you through the next month, depletion, breakdown, the empty boasting and fighting upwards of humiliated workers like Ronnie, who wears a t-shirt bearing the slogan:

WARNING

Madman On Duty

The photographs that accompany the poems complement them perfectly, unflinchingly conveying and criticising the realities of working life. Nearly all of the poetry books produced by the Culture Matters imprint show the publisher’s fidelity to William Blake, the inspiration for their website, in the way they combine text with meaningful images. Here, the grainy photographs, often murky, gritty and gloomy like the world of the poems, vividly express the alienation, poverty and broken-down environment in which those ‘hands’ work, creating riches for others.

When he moves from the workplace to the domestic sphere, the prospect hardly improves. Browbeaten and diminished at work, men and women have little energy, confidence or relaxation to make their intimate relations rich. This is the world of Christopher Lasch’s Haven In A Heartless World, the ironic title of his study of the way the ethos of the kill-or-be-killed workplace has invaded the private sphere, destroying the family and personal relations as an asylum from the dismal alienation of employment.

Kill-or-be-killed may seem exaggerated. People don’t murder one another physically for money or advancement at work, usually – but they do murder one another emotionally and psychologically. Workplaces are snake-pits of back-biting, betrayal, sycophancy, rank-pulling, boredom tolerated in the hope of preferment, where the competition is so vicious because the stakes are so low:

it’s funny really

how 37 years can seem like a couple of chicken bones in a dog’s mouth

when placed alongside this technology...

says the man being dumped after nearly four decades because he can’t keep up with the machines.

Disillusioned, in the best sense, this is poetry which has no need to be flowery. It is direct and simple because it is uncovering the simple truth behind our culture’s manic, ceaseless, sickly, sentimental excuse-making – the human relation on which our society is based, that between employer and employee, is morally indefensible.

Out of this depressing miasma, Hayes extracts black humour. Many of his poems have a humorous edge. When employees share their experiences, they often find gallows humour, which is why employers, more and more, seek to isolate employees from one another – a distinct advantage, for them, of the you-get-shafted economy. In the humour, lies hope. That is the insight at the heart of these poems.

They rarely say it directly, but they imply, time and again, that work should belong to those who do it. Hayes applies the principle of Occam’s razor – the fewer assumptions the better – and the employer’s approach is full of false assumptions. Hayes is determined to expose every one, and show that those who do the work should control the work and benefit from it.

It isn’t an exaggeration to say the whole of our mainstream culture, the press, television, film, music, radio, schools, the church, every bit of it, conspires to conceal this simple truth. Listen to the politicians, the commentators, the interviewers – isn’t it the case that the problems they endlessly discuss emerge from the same source, the unequal relation of employer to employee?

Employment is one of the main drivers of inequality, because unequal ownership rights are built into employment relations in a capitalist economy. It is the Great Money Trick, which Robert Tressell explained in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, and which Karl Marx theorised as the theory of surplus value.

Along with rents from property, and interest on loans, extracting value from work done by employees is one of the means by which the few become richer than anyone should, while the majority get by and those at the bottom are doomed:

where bookies and pawnshops sit side by side

and we aren’t supposed to get the irony

The means by which people are distracted from thinking about this and doing something about it are legion. Buy the latest gadget, or the new release; see the

latest blockbuster, keep up with the newest fashion; download the app that will cut your toe-nails, but never stop and ask yourself why so many people hate their jobs.

It isn’t work that is hateful, but employment. People like to be active. Work should be our hope. Work should be controlled by those who do it, work that is co-operative and rational, work which enchants rather than depresses. That is the vision that Hayes has glimpsed. People are bamboozled into thinking negative ideas must be shunned, but without criticism there is no ground for moral improvement. Hayes stares hard at the negative of employment and brings into the light a better possibility:

the best bits were the Friday afternoons

when the storms that poured down onto our screens all day

suddenly became a trickle..

We evolved to move horizontally, which is why our thigh muscles are so strong. We were made for walking and running long distances in search of food, better shelter, and a more propitious environment. Yet our rulers have elaborated a culture where we are pressed to move vertically. The metaphor is “the greasy pole”. Perhaps a complementary one would be the escalator to nowhere.

Employment is the means to rise. We scramble for a place on the escalator, elbow and kick one another out of the way (in the most polite, Home Counties manner, of course) but if you get to the top all you find is the abyss on the other side.

Adam Smith expressed this well. He called the pursuit of private wealth a “delusion”. Unfortunately, it is the delusion on which our society is based. To be deluded is to be insane or virtually insane. What Hayes writes about is the insanity of a society where employers pursue a delusion by using employees as mere conduits to their lunatic enrichment, as mere ‘hands’ to be employed and make money for the employer.

He is the only British poet who writes consistently and seriously about the workplace. Almost all the others ignore it. When current employment relations are consigned to the dustbin of history, and are viewed as we now view slavery, or the feudal relations between lord and vassal, will people wonder why so little was written about it? Perhaps, but maybe they’ll twig that when an entire culture is in denial, ambitious writers are willing to poke out their own eyes.

Let us sing of the mouse-quiet collectorof glasses, clearer of plates, wiper of tables, he who returns sauce bottles to their allotted place on the worktophe who takes no space at allasks no space at allwho is seventeenwho will surprise you by butting into your conversation about the Milky Waywith an extensive knowledge of cosmologywho will shrug and say he taught himselfbecause what else is there to do here really, what else is there to do?Let us sing of the mouse-quiet collectorof glasses, his slow orbit round tables,of sauce bottles and wisdomand no space at all.Let us raise our glasses.Let us sing.

This poem was one of the winners of the 2018 Bread and Roses Poetry Award, sponsored by Unite.

The memo said,get them out of that bed,Make Lazarus out of the lot of them.By the head or the knee,a puck in the back,a knuckle in the nuts,a sweeping ankle throw,but no bruises.They trespass against us.

Minimum force at all times,except at tea times,give them nothing, no tea, no ham,give them spam. They trespass against us.

Unwilling or unableget them out of that bed.Fed or unfed get them out of that bed,but no bruises. Infirm or informwho cares if they’re warm?They trespass against us.

They are blocking our bedsget them out on their headsThey trespass against us.

Memo meant for senior management eyes only. Written by their legal team, paid to be mean, paid but not seen.They trespass against us.

At eight-fifteen, the band stands up in regimented lines.July, before the schools break – the morning lull brokenby the stray parp of tuning notes, loud and suddenthrough nets ghosting open windows. It’s a signalto get up, throw cardigans over nighties, join the exodusof neighbours slopping feet in slippers, scratching bed hair.Slovenliness forgiven, this once – right now it means moreto be outside, listening to them play.

Dorothy – bitched about me once, with them at thirty-one,but if I cannot forgive her that, what use as a person am I?Her Arthur, taken by cancer in less than a year. Marie, lastof three sisters; a street full of women outliving their men.Sleepy-eyed kids, hurried out of their beds to hear the openingbars of Abide With Me, see The Banner, tassels of gold and red;For The People By The People. Your history, I tell my sons.Your village, see? This is why we don’t forget.

We were children when we lived through the last of the mines.Thatcher – strikes, scabs, picket lines; Arthur Scargillin Barnsley. The Dearne Valley villages – always the backdropof pit-heads, men in donkey jackets, orange panels bright amongallotment leeks. The scent of sparking fires – the sharp, oily smell;powder, staining everything it touched – grimy on the coal man’shessian skin, sooting the sacks on his flat-bed truck. Dad, quittingbefore it got too late, did not want the blackness settling on his lungs.

Wath Main, Wombwell, Hickleton, Manvers – given to nature now,flat under birds. Nineteen eighty-four. The corridors of our local compoverrun with cameras from the BBC – kids sticking two fingers upfor the telly. Tracy, from my year at school is missing and so areher brothers; Darren and Paul have been killed, while scavengingfor slack on Goldthorpe coal-tips. The funeral – playing the schoolsdented brass, my tongue dried up on the mouthpiece, metallicwith tears and tin. Brothers don’t die – they do not die beneath

embankments of smother and soot before they are sixteen, burstingtheir lungs under slag; their fathers fingers digging through the scree,nails split, skin torn. Blood and choke. The drummer strikes the skinof the bass drum. A sonic boom, as if Gabriel himself is smitingthe roofs of our estate. The troop moves down the hill – people,magnetised like iron filings follow the flag; dwindling to a lastearful of airborne notes, clear as crystal tears. Left behind,we swallow the thick in our throats; faces lit by zealot’s blaze.

There is nothing left. Stranded here and there a winding mechanism;giant upturned bogie wheels framed against the sky. Beamish tunnelto gawp at – to remind us of kiddies pulling up half-ton coal tubsin the dark; their lives lit by the whim of a candle's flame.

Gala Day, Durham Miners was previously published by Proletarian Poetry and is part of Jane's pamphlet, Fat Around The Middle.

Thanks to all of you who sent in poems this year. We received over 800 poems, so we're very grateful to all the contributors, and to Andy Croft from Smokestack Books and Mary Sayer from Unite for doing the difficult job of choosing the winners and the other poems to go into this year's anthology.

All the poems will be posted up shortly. Mary Sayer said this about the competition:

This is my second year judging this much-needed and extraordinary competition. Again, I was struck by the passion, the urgency and the sheer hard work driving people to write these poems. So many of the entries were beautifully put together, often with a story that demanded to be told and with artfully refreshing humour.

The poems all reflected the fact that we find ourselves in such bleak and alienating times – making this type of competition more crucial than ever. And this year we had a particularly healthy number of entries from women and from young people – again, a reflection of deep, unvoiced feelings from those hardest hit by today’s increasingly rampant inequality.

So, thanks to all of you passionate poets out there – keep them coming! If I had my way, it would be like Alice in Wonderland: “All are winners and all should have prizes”

And Andy Croft said this:

At a time when the British poetry world is sinking under the weight of so many self-promoting vanity projects, it was a pleasure and a privilege to able to read so many moving, witty and well-written entries to the Bread and Roses competition. While the poems ranged in subject-matter, voices and styles, they shared a radical common-sense that social inequality is worse than ever, that government is remote and hostile, and that only in collective work and struggle can we begin to imagine another way of living.

The best entries try to describe the tectonic historical plates beneath the surface of everyday life, making connections with other poets, other readers, other histories and managing to avoid nostalgia, helpless anger or generalised pity. I really hope that Culture Matters is going to publish a big anthology of the best of these poems as a follow-up to last year's wonderful On Fighting On anthology.

Fran Lock responds to Trump's visit, in prose and in verse. See here for some of the ways President Trump has described immigrants.

I laughed until I cried

I don’t find Trump funny anymore. I used to. Or rather, I used to laugh at him, which is not quite the same thing. I laughed at his chip-shop saveloy complexion, his aerosol cheese hair, his Neanderthal attitude, his asinine pronouncements. There’s a lot to laugh at, on the surface, and in any case, isn’t laughter supposed to be a weapon and a remedy? A tool, a sword, a cure? Sure. “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand” says good ol’ Mark Twain. Which sounds fine, but I’m willing to wager, had Twain lived to witness the long cross-continental shadow cast by Trumpnado, he might have felt differently.

Because we laughed at him, we laughed hard and long, and yet, lo and behold, here he is, a self-important perma-tanned juggernaut bearing down on the sick and the poor; on immigrant children, on people of colour, on women, on women of colour especially. And where did our laughter get us? Maybe it’s the thing we use to get us through, to let off steam, and that’s okay, it’s cathartic and it’s neccessary. But we need to stop kidding ourselves that humour on its own is an effective substitute for radical action. Laughter has value as praxis only when it’s used to reach people, to educate, to give us a positive spur to coalesce around and from which we can move forward. Otherwise, it robs its target of threat, of real, material menace; it reduces in scale that which faces us. Worse, it makes us complacent, and a little bit smug.

I saw this reflected not only throughout the American election and Trump’s already-too-long tenure as president, but also during my somewhat Londo-centric social media interactions during the run up to Brexit. And yeah, I laughed at the Facecrook posts knocking seven shades of satirical shit out of the diehard Brexiteers too, but laughter has its limits. We were talking to ourselves, congratulating ourselves on being clever and nice and not massively racist, and trusting that our being so, without actually doing anything would be enough. Wrong.

Same with Trump. And this one is personal for me. Actually, scrap that, it should be personal for all of us, especially now, in the wake of Brexit. Where America leads, Britain will follow, not just in terms of disastrous sabre-rattling foreign policy, environmentally suicidal climate denial, and a privatising nightmare we’re only now beginning to taste the poisonous fruits of, but in terms of the wider culture, the attitudes and ideas Trump’s bigotry legitimates. This should scare us all. Look at the parallels in immigration policy alone, the respective actions of both the Trump and May administrations in splitting up families through either detention or deportation. It’s enough to make you a little bit sick in your mouth.

But it’s personal for me in a specific way, in that somebody I love is an American citizen without the financial security to access the health care he needs either to treat his condition or to allow him to die without pain, and with dignity. Not that Trump created this situation, but his rhetoric embeds and enshrines the free market economy and the privatised for-profit health care system that is killing an entire uninsured underclass of American citizens. This is beyond shameful. This is beyond disgusting.

So I don’t find Trump funny anymore. I dread him. And I don’t find it funny that a large proportion of that very same underclass are the ones responsible for voting him into power in the first place. I find that nothing but sad, tragic in point of fact, and a massive indictment, not only of the competing political elites in America, but of us all.

“I’ve always made more money in bad markets than in good markets” gloated Trump in 2007, stating at the time that he was “excited” about the impending sub-prime mortgage crisis, because it afforded him the opportunity of personal enrichment. His first book, the ever-nauseating “The Art of the Deal” contains many other such gems, in which the tycoon describes the stock market plays that built his personal fortune, capitalising on catastrophe, exploiting the misery and misfortune of others, and cannibalising the repossessed properties and businesses of those less lucky than himself. Just in case anybody was in doubt: Trump couldn’t give shit one about you, and Trump couldn’t give shit one about poor white America either.

So why did anyone vote for him? And why would anyone who lived through the Big Society vote Tory twice? And what in God’s name is the deal with Farage, while we’re about it? A friend of mine has a phrase for it that often emerges in response to this question: TVC, or Turkeys Voting for Christmas. And there is a grain of truth in this, but it’s problematic too. It gives a name to the what, it doesn’t answer the why, and it’s frankly supercilious, at least it is perceived to be. This perception is a large part of the problem.

Because Trump’s election to president wasn’t a victory for the Republicans, so much as it was an epic failure by the Democrats to engage with or even acknowledge an entire swathe of the voting public. Clinton in the States and the liberal left in Britain treat the white working-classes as an inconvenient embarrassment, with the act of going out into their communities a hazard to be gone through, or, if at all possible, utterly avoided, their interactions stage-managed, choreographed, curtailed. Politicians seem to think that ignoring a prejudice means it will go away or, at the very least, be rendered irrelevant in the grand scheme when the votes are tallied. Nobody in mainstream politics is making the effort to reach these people, to have the difficult conversations. It’s hard to listen, and having listened, challenge. It’s easy to life, to sneer, to write people off as bigoted or ignorant without ever having to examine where that ignorance is springing from, how that bigotry was socially engineered. The difference between the right and the liberal left at this moment in history seems to be between pandering to a prejudice and pretending that it doesn’t exist.

Trump, Farage, and May to a lesser extent, all of their poisonous ilk, at least give the illusion of listening. It’s cynical and it’s manipulative, but it is permitted to thrive because it does so in a vacuum. Generations of politicians have impoverished education, and stripped analytical thinking out of successive curriculums because it was politically expedient to do so. And now there is a working class, a mobile vulgaris, it’s safe to hate, safe to laugh at, because they – we – are nasty and racist and uncouth and ignorant.

My hope for Corbyn’s Labour is that he / they will listen. And I mean really listen, not just parrot back a few stock phrases and tell people what they think they want to hear. To be a good politician, a good leader, is the same as being a good friend; it’s having the courage to say I hear you, and I understand, but I think you’re wrong and this is why. It’s to trust people with the truth, to empower them to make their own choices, even if they’re wrong, even if it fucks your career. More than even we need a selfless human, not a career politician, and definitely not some narcissistic Day-Glo tycoon.

I kind of like the Trump baby blimp, and I enjoy constructing elaborate streams of invective. Fun is fun, and sometimes we need it, because the fight, and the reality of that fight is pretty grim. But it’s also real. Trump isn’t as harmless as a baby, and he isn’t some amusing Clouseau-esque buffoon. He’s a predator, in every sense, and an arch manipulator. We deserve better, all of us. Even those who voted for him. Especially them.

first among monsters

his face is fighting itself on the slim, convextv. supremacies and syndromes, telescopingsalaries, a loan-shark in a camel coat. i’ve seenhim before. eats medical waste. his home alone cameo. dry hump and humvee and nonplussed pussy. spasm in the hand in a parking garage.advancing his havoc in hotel lobbies. tiepins redouble their diamonds when he walks by.a whiplash lust in daterape heels is blotting her mouth on a monogrammed towel. she slipsinside a gideon bible. she cannot hide. he hasgreased the big idea, and now he’s snapping on the latex glove. the dagger dipped in butter,saturated fats. the consistency of silence isfries, is coke, is foie gras, fillet of risk. crackedgasket, holocaust denial. his name a blister on your lip. a round, white pain you pick at, repossessed, persistently ill-starred. decipher this wayward light, entangled or refined. glowslike a desktop monitor. a private light he reinvests in cancer. and now he’s twice his teeming size, trailing success like the stinkof fish. you are the meat he profits off. a vilestar flounders, the sky cannot contain suchomens. your pockets repurpose anotherstone. a gravel-desperation. an aggregate,a currency. these arteries constrict, teetherode like empires. meshback cap. the klan.the slang. the threadneedle whispersof politics. his lapels are rehearsing a flag.each suck of air is a new, less gracefultheft.

Mike Quille interviews Paul Summers, including extracts from a major new poem which is published by Culture Matters. It will be launched at the People, Pits and Politics festival in Durham on Friday 13th July, the day before the Miners’ Gala, and is available for purchase here.

Paul Summers is deeply rooted in the working-class pit communities of the North East, and the poem was commissioned from him by Culture Matters. Its aim is to show, as a poetical and political statement, the growing political importance under Corbyn’s Labour Party of the socialist values and politics of the old mining communities – the women as well as the men – who struggled for a more caring, collective and co-operative way of life through their sheer hard work, their trade unions, and their political affiliations.

This heritage is celebrated and recreated annually at the Gala in Durham, one of the world’s biggest working-class cultural festivals, and the poem links the processions at the Gala to the rebirth of a more class conscious, socialist politics in the labour movement and the Labour Party.

MQ: To start with, can you tell us something about yourself? What's your background, and how did you come to appreciate and write poetry?

PS: I was born in Blyth, Northumberland, in 1967. We lived in an old 2 up 2 down terrace in a place called Cowpen, half a mile west of Bates’ Pit (the last working pit out of the 10 or so that had existed in Blyth) where both my grandads had worked and half a mile east of Bebside village, where my great and great-great-grandads had settled in the 1850s to hew coals.

It was a lovely old working-class community: we had all the romantic clichés of back doors left open, borrowing cups of sugar or coal from the neighbours, a wash-day chorus of gossip in the back lane, as well as the less romantic realities of the domestic violence, the alcoholism and the undercurrent of racism. I suppose it was quite an anachronistic place on reflection; whenever I recount it to people now it feels as though I was brought up in Beamish Museum or on the set of When The Boat Comes In.

Most of the people in the street were old, retired miners, their wives or widows and they were all good talkers, fond of a yarn or a song and a bit of reminiscence about ye olden days, the hardships they’d endured and the mischief they’d got up to. They were an oral historian’s dream. I was captivated by them, seduced by their stories, and I think that’s what sowed the seed of me being a yarner of sorts too.

Class, politics, social history and cultural identity were ever present, all wrapped up in their tales of extraordinary ordinariness. I think I decided quite early on that I fancied being a south-east Northumbrian version of John Boy from The Walton’, documenting the place I lived in and the characters who I shared it with. To a greater or lesser extent, I’ve just about succeeded in fulfilling my career model. I’m not sure that being a poet featured highly in that plan but it’s what I’ve found I’m probably best at, despite still occasionally dabbling in bits of prose and drama.

I had a great comprehensive education too, and was encouraged by a few ‘special’ teachers to take my writing seriously and to keep on being in love with history and peoples’ stories.

I was 17 in 1984, when the Miners’ Strike started. It brought politics with a capital ‘P’ to our front door. It highlighted both the unities and divisions within the community, in opinion, ideologies and realities. I remember the pragmatism of some of the older fellas, like my granda, saying that most pits were like men and if you got 3 score and ten years out of them you’d have been lucky.

I remember the ferocity of support for Scargill from many others who were fighting for their futures (or their children’s futures) and who could foresee the coming desolation of a town without industry or opportunity. I remember witnessing the heavy hand of the police state first hand for the first time – waking up to find a long line of South Yorkshire SPG riot vans parked up along Cowpen Road, in readiness for any bother on the picket line.

I remember a few (slightly drunken) mates getting viciously beaten up by the coppers on the night that Scargill spoke at Croft Park, the home of the mighty Blyth Spartans. I remember the tales of hardship and suicidal depression you’d hear around the doors, the hate-filled stories of scabs and Tory vindictiveness, as well as the stories of incredible resolve, resilience and solidarity.

Anyhow, the strike was defeated and in a few years the pit was closed. Blyth didn’t fare too well for a decade or so after that. I think at some point in the late 80s we had the dubious honour of being voted the most depressing place in the country twice in a row, and being labelled as the heroin capital of the north.

Plenty to bear witness to, plenty to educate you in social injustice and existential torment, in defeat and optimism, in nihilism and hope, in grief and joy, in laughter and tears, plenty of complex stuff that a person could easily spend their entire creative life trying to unpick & make sense of.

MQ: Can you tell us something about your poetic career, what you've been trying to achieve and how that's changed over the years?

PS: I’d left school at 17 and motivated no doubt by TV lawyer Petrocelli, I started to work as a trainee legal executive at a solicitors’ office in Newcastle. It was a thoroughly Dickensian institution which paid us less than the dole for working from 8 till 5.30, and it fuelled my dislike for the upper classes, my hatred of privilege and my growing sense of social injustice. Luckily for me (in retrospect) I was sacked in 1987, for playing snooker when I should have been at Newcastle College doing my afternoon-release Legal Executive’s course.

If nothing else my dismissal encouraged me to go and do my A Levels and to start thinking about getting a degree. In the process of the former I met three literature lecturers/poets called Brendan Cleary, George Charlton & Tony Baynes. All three were interested in and supportive of my writing and at that moment in time that was the only motivation I needed. They introduced me to literary magazines and the work of other writers and they encouraged me to start submitting stuff myself.

By 1990 I’d had bits and bobs of stuff published and had, by a strange fluke of history, found myself co-organising the Morden Tower poetry readings in Newcastle. The tragic suicide of my fellow co-organiser left me, the anxious rookie, at the helm. It was an interesting time – I met some great poets and my poetic education continued, and I made some long-lasting allies and friends. I also learned what a self-interested viper’s nest the creative world could be, and how the world of literature was still fairly bourgeois and unwelcoming to a working class man. All good lessons for a naïve, small-town boy.

I’d published a few little chapbooks through Brendan Cleary’s Echo Room Press in the nineties, and picked up a couple of writers’ awards from Northern Arts, but the last bus was my first proper collection. Iron Presspublished it on May 1st 1998, and luckily it was well received and reviewed. It even got the title sequence from the book in that year’s Forward poetry anthology, and a brief but favourable mention in the broadsheets.

the last bus was all about growing up in Blyth, all about the micro-universe of Cowpen, all about family, friends and acquaintances, all about love and loss. But it was also, by default, about the bigger stuff: about class, politics, identity and history, dead-set on exploring the tensions between romanticised and realistic representations of a working-class community. I was already tired of unquestioningly romantic Geordierama versions of working class existence in the north East. It created my version of Walton’s Mountain, not pre-war Virginia but Thatcher era, post-industrial Northumberland – and hopefully not just sentimental and eulogising. It was full of rage and love, the complexity of identity and familial relations. It was me trying to tell the truth, or my truth anyhow, to be authentic, to tell it how it was, warts and all.

The next few books just picked up the baton – any street, any town, ‘all human life is here’ (and worthy of poetry). In fact, I don’t think I’ve veered that far from that way of thinking in the following twenty years of writing. The focus on community or geography might occasionally shift, town to city, macro to domestic, Britain to Australia and back, but the desire to report, document and interrogate people and place remains the same. My muses or motivations to write remain the same too: rage and outrage, confusion and bewilderment, love, rapture and grief, all of them demanding the need to bear witness.

MQ. There are a number of issues around poetry and politics that I'd like to explore with you. What are your own political beliefs, and how do they influence your choice of poetic subject and approach?

PS: I like to think that I’m a compassionate socialist who isn’t averse to most of the core values of communism. I’d very much like to see the end of capitalism and neo-liberalism and for them to be replaced with a more equitable, just, democratic and sustainable model of society free of class division, elites, patriarchy and hierarchies.

Much of my poetry is shaped by this political positioning and my experiences as a working class, comprehensively educated bloke from the post-industrial North East of England. A reviewer once said that my work ‘wasn’t political in the way Brecht or Neruda’s was, but that it was full of politics nonetheless’. My granda, who was fond of a proverb, used to say it was fine to wave the flag but a different thing altogether to hit people over the head with the flag-staff. I think I try and do precisely that.

I hope I authentically and empathically represent and document aspects of my community, I hope I display compassion and care. I hope the questions I occasionally pose on our behaviours are relevant ones, and that my frequent outrage is well placed. I hope that me bearing witness to the things which appal and enrage me occasionally impacts on other people’s thinking.

I hope I occasionally encourage an intellectual or ideological response from people as well as an emotional one. I hope people find the beauty and tenderness in my poems which might re-energise them or keep a darkness at bay. I hope I model being a ‘decent’, compassionate person in my work. I don’t think you’d have to work very hard to establish my politics – I hope you can see the flag even though I am not always whacking you with it.

MQ: What's your view on the history of poetry, and its close historical association with politically dominant and leisured classes in society?

PS: Poetry may have been genuinely popular in the British Isles at several moments of history, when an oral tradition was dominant amongst largely illiterate societies. Whether it was a population transfixed by the retelling of a Viking saga or the romans of the troubadours and minstrels, folklore and song, to the doggerel of the music hall and the gin-house balladeers, or Kipling’s imperial jingoism. Oral transmission popularised poetry and made the form more accessible to all classes, not just the book-owning, forelock tugging, velvet-suited elites.

This all seems to have changed with the advent of modernism, when for one reason or another, poetry seems to have retrenched itself as a ‘difficult’ or ‘high’ art and retreated back into the confines of its ivory towers (or red brick university towers). And the upper classes asserted a new set of conventions to make the canon more exclusive and impenetrable, and by turns less human and engaging.

This position wasn’t really challenged in Britain until the 60s, when a generation of baby-boomer, working-class, grammar school kids started to introduce poetic narratives and styles that were more familiar and engaging to the broader population. This coincided with the Beat movement in the US, with May 68 in Paris and the Summer of Love in America. Poetry had a brief renaissance, existing happily alongside the words of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and their like. Even then though, the reach of poetry into the world of the working classes was miniscule in comparison to the gin-house days.

Since then, you could argue there has a been a painfully slow democratisation of the form. As Sean O’Brien suggested in The Deregulated Muse, the last thirty or forty years has undoubtedly seen a more diverse range of voices appear, denting the glass ceilings of gender, class, race and sexuality, and there are probably more physical and virtual platforms for dissemination than ever before. However, it’s still a long way from reaching mainstream status, where it’s readily consumed by the masses.

Despite the perennial broadsheet hype suggesting poetry is the new rock and roll, book sales and audiences suggest the contrary. It’s still a fairly marginalised artform with a limited reach, and limited opportunity for it to be a sustainable way of making a living, unless you find a niche in academia or socially engaged activities.

Some of the indie presses are trying their damnedest to increase this diversity and readership but mostly they do it without resource or capacity to impact on the already flooded cultural arena.

The premier publishing houses still have limited sized lists and equally limited marketing capacity and generally speaking they are still, in my opinion, fairly bourgeois and unchallenging in their choices of poets to champion.

Then we have the various splits & factions within the poetry world itself: around aesthetics, regional identities , our various sociological classifications and identities, the ascendancy of stage and page, the academic and the ‘popular’, the ‘majors’ and the ‘minors’, the left and the right, the ‘art for art’s sake’ mob and the politically engaged creative utilitarians.

We poets are a very disunited and disjointed village and fragmentation, as anyone familiar with leftist politics will tell you, has never been a strength in terms of furthering your message or realising change.

MQ: How do you think poetry can contribute towards making a better, juster, world?

PS: We as poets can bear witness to and challenge atrocity and social injustice at every level we find it, we can be moral arbiters and polemicists, agitators and rabble-rousers. We can flag up the experience of the marginalised and forgotten. We can be conduits for the telling and re-telling of histories, and the dissemination of alternative ideas and ideologies.

We can remind people of the things we share, our commonalities, as well as celebrating our difference. We can validate experiences and create a sense of universal interest. We can celebrate beauty, compassion and altruism. We can provide a space of sanctuary, delight or quiet grieving. We can make people laugh as well as move them to tears. We can remind each other of our humanity and of the responsibilities that goes with enacting and facilitating that humanity. We can encourage broader participation, be brave enough to take our work into non-traditional environments, we can be educators and facilitators, we can organise events and publish.

We can collaborate, collectivise and work cross-form. We can actually start to think like cultural democrats and political activists, rather than wallowing in our garrets or talking only to our respective choirs. We can do whatever our motivations, confidence and energy levels allow us. We can all be subversives if we understand what and who we are fighting against.

fish quay fugues

i. doggerland

the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.

MQ. Can you say something about how you wrote this poem and what it means to you?

PS: doggerland is from a new sequence of poems I’m working on called the fish quay fugues. The poems document the flights of my imagination as I walk by the river.

Walking has become part of my creative practice. I walk every day, rain, hail or shine. Usually it’s the same route: from my house in North Shields down the bank to the River Tyne at the Fish Quay, then eastwards towards the Spanish Battery Prow, onto the Haven Beach at Tynemouth, then back home to Shields via Collingwood’s Monument, Knott’s Flats and Northumberland Park.

At low tide I walk out on the rocks in a vain search for sea-borne archaeological treasures and a high tide along the promenade. It’s become a form of meditation, sometimes a head-clearing exercising, sometimes a thought-refining process. Lots of creative ideas are polished and there is much philosophising en route.

I have spent, and continue to spend, a great chunk of my life trying to negotiate with myself over a position of continued optimism for humankind and for the arrival of some sort of socialist utopia: the great & ponderous dialectic between hope and despondency. History proves that I am more than capable of the latter path, the path of perpetual moping, angry cynicism or even nihilism, but it’s not a version of myself I’m particularly attracted to. It doesn’t seem like a very sustainable model for your general wellbeing or that of those around you.

So, I continue to dredge my psyche for a semblance of hope. I do this even though throughout my adult life, it has often seemed as if we have stumbled from one period of Brechtian ‘dark times’ to another, without any real or sustained recourse to any ‘light times’. I do this even though reality tells me I have experienced lots of ideological defeats and disappointments and very few victories.

Now that I am a decade into being a parent, I feel even more of an obligation to be hopeful, at least within my outward looking face. Otherwise, the prospects of my children’s futures are just too difficult to contemplate. It is because of this, I genuinely feel we must remain stubbornly optimistic, we must remain robustly hopeful that the ‘glorious day’ will come, equality & peace will prevail & that all the evils of capitalism will be kicked into touch for good.

I think these new poems are all addressing this nagging question of hope and despair, and generally speaking – up to now anyway – they are leaning towards optimism, even if that optimism is slightly metaphysical.

It strikes me that both optimism & hope may both be forms of necessary denial: essential parts of the toolkit of any forward-looking socialist trying to keep the red flag flying and the black dog at bay.

Extract from arise!

by Paul Summers

‘they being dead yet speaketh’

so history is done,the shafts capped,

the breathless heaps erased or made-over:

a short-cut to asda,a low gradient jog,

somewhere for the dogto take a shit.

no monument save memory,

save anecdote & frail romance,

no rusted remnant, no totem mark,

only nature to sing their hymn.

a broken picket-line of hunch-backed thistles,

a huddle of poppiesin a fly-tipped fridge,

summer’s shrill birdsong captive in a cage of gorse,

three score years & tenof spoil beneath our feet,

our antecedentsrendered mute & obsolete,

our pasts & presentwedged asunder,

their marriage annulledby devious progress.

history is donethe cynics proclaim,

they do not hear itnagging in our veins,

they do not hear the bitter wind

hiss its litanyof familiar names.

they do not hear the whispered yakka

echo in the helixof our complex genes.

they do not hearthe roll-call

of redundant lives,of prospects slain

at altars of profit& heinous spite.

history is donethe sages refrain,

they do not hear itniggling in our veins.

MQ.Can you tell us a bit about what the Gala and mining history means to you?

PS: As I implied earlier, my family has had a connection to coal-mining since the late 1700s. The Summers ancestors started out working in the bell-pits of north Northumberland then migrated southwards towards Newcastle and south-east Northumberland as the process was more industrialised. Other branches of the family migrated eastwards from Cumbria or northwards from Cornwall into the Durham coalfield before they ultimately ended up in Blyth. My dad was the first man in his direct bloodline in over a hundred and fifty years never to work down the pit, choosing the relatively safety of the Town Gas Yard and a fitter’s apprenticeship instead. It’s safe to say that coal, and the traditions that go with mining it, is firmly embedded in our genetic make-up.

As a Blyth boy we always went to the Northumberland Miners’ Picnic at Attlee Park in Bedlington. We’d march from Blyth behind the Bates & Cambois Banner. It was similarly rousing but only a proportion of the scale of Durham by the time I can remember it. I’ve fond memories though, good rousing speakers, brass bands, abundant ice cream & candy floss. My mam had even been a Picnic Queen in the late fifties, representing West Sleekburn Colliery. It still exists today to a greater or lesser degree, and happens at Woodhorn Museum in early June.

I‘d never been to the Big Meeting in Durham until the early nineties but now I try to get there whenever I can. It’s an amazing spectacle and still incredibly moving I think. There were a quarter of million people there last year, and it’s still regarded as the biggest trade union event in Europe – and that’s despite the fact that we’ve got no deep-mines left in either the Durham or Northumberland coalfields.

arise! by Paul Summers is available here. 10% of sales income will go to to the Durham Miners’ Association, towards the restoration of Redhills and its development into a cultural hub for the area.